Literary Voices

Daisy Rockwell is a painter and award-winning translator of Hindi and Urdu literature. She has published numerous translations from Hindi and Urdu, including Ashk’s  Falling Walls , Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas , and Khadija Masur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her translation of Krishna Sobti’s final novel, A Gujarat here, a Gujarat there was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2019. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand won the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

Han Zhang is an editor at large at Riverhead books and is working to introduce contemporary Chinese-language literary works to English readers. She has acquired and edited novels and story collections from award-winning international authors such as Zhang Yueran. As a journalist, she has written about the political and literary narratives that have shaped Chinese culture and identities for the New Yorker and the New York Times magazine including in depth reporting on the backlash against feminism in China, the impact of COVID 19 pandemic in China and the US, and the Chinese diaspora.

Johnny Lorenz, son of Brazilian immigrants to the United States, is a professor of English at Montclair State University. His multiple award-winning translations include Clarice Lispector’s A Breath of Life and The Besieged City. His book of poetry, Education by Windows, was published by Poets & Traitors Press. His research has appeared in Luso-Brazilian Review, Modern Fiction Studies, and Latin American Literary Review. He has received a Fulbright and a PEN / Heim Translation Fund Grant. He recently translated The Front  by Edimilson de Almeida Pereira. Lorenz’ translation of Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow received generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a finalist for the International Booker Prize. His translation of Vieira Junior's Saving the Fire will appear in September 2026.

Natalya Sukhonos was born in Odesa, Ukraine and immigrated to the US at the age of nine. She earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard, with her dissertation about play as a response to crisis in the works of Borges, Pelevin, and Brazilian author Clarice Lispector.

Sukhonos’ recent articles include a study of Leo Tolstoy’s use of hallucinogenic dream imagery and stream of consciousness to critique war and a critique of interpretation in favor of a more holistic, attention-based approach to aesthetic experience. She has taught at Harvard, Stanford, UC Davis, and Zayed Universities, is the Content Producer for Roundtable at the 92nd Street Y, and is founder of the Art Salon Series, an ongoing series of interdisciplinary conversations in the realm of art, politics, social impact, healthcare, the environment, and beyond. Sukhonos has published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Sunlight Trapped In Stone (Mar 2026).

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet, essayist, and memoirist. She is the author of five books of poems: Instructions for The Lovers, a 2024 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE; and, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was a 2022 United States Artist Fellow, the inaugural Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh, and the founding Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Currently, she is Professor & Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and is writing a memoir, When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books.

Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, novelist, artist, performer—has published nineteen books, including Camp Marmalade,Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, and Jackie Under My Skin. The Queen’s Throat, praised by Susan Sontag as “a brilliant book,” was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and appeared this year in French translation. His novel, Circus, was reissued in July 2019 with an introduction by Rachel Kushner. Projects also include a book of short fiction, The Cheerful Scapegoat, and an essay collection, Figure It Out. His essays and poems have been widely published in periodicals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Iowa Review, Cabinet, and Artforum. A prolific artist and performer, Koestenbaum has also written the libretto for Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O, Mohammed Fairouz’s Pierrot, has exhibited his own paintings in solo shows at White Columns, 356 Mission, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum, as well as in many group shows, and had his first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act, released by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in 2017; he has given musical performances of his improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, The Artist’s Institute, and the Renaissance Society. He played the title role in Robert Ashley’s opera The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer at the 2014 Whitney Biennial and in 2016 at L.A.’s 356 Mission. Koestenbaum’s brief essay-films, are the most recent development of his interdisciplinary, multi-media practice. His literary archive is in the Yale Collection of American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He is winner of a Whiting Writers Award, and was a co-winner of the Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize. Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

mj corey is a Brooklyn-based psychotherapist and author of Dekonstructing the Kardashians (Pantheon May 2026), a combination of theory and cultural analysis. She is well known for authoring Kardashian Kolloquium on TikTok and Instagram, where she applies media theory and postmodern frameworks to the Kardashian family, and her writing has been featured by Refinery29, Paper Magazine, and The New Yorker, among many others. She also maintains a recap column about the family’s reality show with Vogue Magazine, and a personal substack called DeKonstructing the Kardashians. Her work has also been featured at the Museum of Modern Art. MJ also collaborates on a blog called Infinity of Lists with her friend Nimay Ndolo, and a web series called Between Two Salads with her sister, Marie. 

Deborah Kapchan is an American folklorist, writer, translator and ethnographer, specializing in North Africa and its diaspora in Europe, particularly in Morocco and France. She is Professor emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, and the former director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology (now the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies) at the University of Texas at Austin. Deborah Kapchan is a writer as well as a translator of North African poetry and ritual A Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of six books as well as numerous essays and translations. Her first book Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition was a Choice “best academic book of the year,” while her volume, Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry, was shortlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Prize for Poetry in 2021. Taking Leave, a memoir about her relation to the three religions of the book, was published in 2025. She is currently writing a book entitled Listening to Bergman’s Library, about an island in the Baltic Sea, its landscape, ghosts and history.

Michele Filgate is the editor of a critically acclaimed anthology What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About,and the anthology What My Father and I Don’t Talk About. Her work has appeared in Longreads,Joyland, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Refinery29, Slice, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Salon, Interview Magazine, Buzzfeed, The Barnes & Noble Review, Poets & Writers, CNN.com, Time Out New York, People, The Daily Beast, O, The Oprah Magazine, Men's Journal, Vulture, and other publications. In 2016, Brooklyn Magazine named Filgate one of "The 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture." She’s a former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, a former contributing editor at Literary Hub, and is founder of the Red Ink series. She teaches or has taught creative writing at Columbia, NYU, The New School, The Sackett Street Writers' Workshop, Catapult, and others.

Erin Somers is a writer, reporter, and book critic based in the Hudson Valley. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Esquire, GQ, The Nation, The New Republic, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Her first novel, Stay Up With Hugo Best (2019), was a Vogue Magazine Best Book of the Year. Her second novel, The Ten Year Affair (2025), was named a best book of the year by NPR, the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Literary Hub and Esquire, and was an NYT Editors' Choice. 

Julia Phillips is the author of the bestselling novels Bear andDisappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow. Julia's work has been translated into twenty-six languages. She has written for The New York Times, ​The Atlantic, and The Paris Review and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program. She is also on the board of the Crime Victims Treatment Center, a nonprofit that helps people heal from violence.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Mariner Books. A contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022. He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, among others. Chee is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Joseph Fasano is a poet, novelist, and songwriter. His many books of poetry and prose include The Teacher, The Last Song of the World , The Swallows of Lunetto, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, Fugue for Other Hands, and Vincent. His honors include the Rattle Poetry Prize, the Cider Press Review Book Award, and a nomination by Linda Pastan for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year." His work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Boston Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in New York and is the Founder of Fasano Academy.

Jeanne-Marie Fleming, MFA, Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of Write to Reach: Writing as Transformation. Her prose is published or forthcoming at The Writing Disorder, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Flash Fiction Magazine, trampset, JMWW, The Los Angeles Review, BULL, Black Fork Review, MER Literary, Pangyrus, The Chronogram, and elsewhere. She is working on a hybrid collection about a mother's heartache. Additionally, she hosts an online accountability group and serves as a writing mentor for incarcerated citizens via Transforming Lives NY. A frequent reader at the Howland Cultural Center’s  Lit Lit open mic, she is so grateful to be connected to the thriving arts community in Beacon. Her writing explores and interrogates the complexity of familial relationships. Some of her recently published work can be seen at www.jeannemariefleming.com

Moderator - Translation

Writer, translator, ethnographer. Recipient of Fulbright-Hays, Guggenheim, and American Folklore Society fellowships. Dr Kapchan is professor emerita of New York Univ. and Univ of Texas.

Moderator - Poetry

Poet, editor, publisher, curator, and columnist for all things literary (and community). Owner/managing Partner of Stanza Books in Beacon, NY and Editor in Chief at Sacred Consort Media.

Moderator -Poetry

Dutchess County and Beacon Poet Laureate. Author of five poetry collections. Founder of Live Writing, Atlas Reading Series, and founding curator of Beacon Litfest. Dr Danon is professor emerita of New York Univ.

Moderator - Fiction

Director of Marketing at Alfred A. Knopf where he leads social media strategy and curates marketing campaigns for bestselling titles. Prior to working in publishing, he was a bookseller. Says nice things and shares little book reviews on social media @matthewsciarappa. Lives for book launches, poetry, and the occasional very good meal. Fun is mandatory.